Psalms

Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck - The Complete Psalms - van der Kamp, Gesualdo Consort Amsterdam (2012) {12CD Set Glossa GCD922407}
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© 2012 Glossa Music | GCD922407
Classical / Renaissance / Sacred

Without doubt, Het Sweelinck Monument, the ‘Sweelinck Monument’, has been one of the most important recording projects of recent years. Recognized as such by Queen Beatrix of The Netherlands herself at a ceremony celebrated in November 2010 at the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam, this involved the entire vocal output of Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck – the most important Dutch composer ever – being recorded for the first time. This project, published by Glossa in the form of six book-discs in The Netherlands, culminates now for the international market with the release, in a 12-disc box set, of the 150 Psalms. Previously issued, it is worth pointing out, have been the Complete Secular Works (GCD 922401, 3 CDs) and the Cantiones Sacrae (GCD 922406, 2 CDs).

Louis Lewandowski, conductor, choral director and organist at Berlin’s Oranienburger Strasse synagogue, was a pioneer of modern Jewish liturgical music, whose reforms led to the creation of a new liturgy for Jewish synagogue services, a liturgy that combined classical Western music with traditional synagogue singing and restored an important role to organ music introducing a Romantic style influenced by Mendelssohn, whose family fostered Lewandowski’s career.

In the middle of the 16th century, the Geneva Psalter infected the whole of Reformed Europe – Switzerland included – with a true psalm fever. The first complete collection of all 150 psalms, promoted by the Genevan reformer Jean Calvin, was published in 1562. The psalm verses were translated into French and provided with melodies by various Genevan cantors.

Cappella Amsterdam and its artistic leader Daniel Reuss present their third Pentatone album with a recording of Alfred Schnittke’s Psalms of Repentance. Schnittke composed the piece in 1988 to commemorate the Christianisation of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus in 1988, and based it on anonymous Russian texts from the 16th century about guilt and repentance. It is one of the most impressive large-scale works for a cappella choir written in the twentieth century, setting intensely emotional texts to equally expressive music, and approaching centuries-old Orthodox musical traditions through the lens of late twentieth-century music. This recording uses the original manuscript, which differs in multiple ways from the published score, resulting in an interpretation that aims to be closer to the composer’s intentions.

To point out that in the Symphony of Psalms Stravinsky uses the word “symphony” in a special way is to be redundant. With Stravinsky everything is a special case. No one composer has given us a more varied series of suggestions about what “symphony” can mean than Stravinsky, with his sequence of the early Symphony in E‑flat major (1907), Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1921), Symphony of Psalms (1930), Symphony in C (1940), and Symphony in Three Movements (1945). Of these, the Symphonies of Wind Instruments and the Symphony of Psalms are linked not only by their solemnity and a certain austere sound, but also by the composer’s return to the original sense of “symphony” as a mingling of sounds and by his departure from the Classic‑Romantic associations that surround the word.